High-yield production of graphene by liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite.

By Y. Hernández, V. Nicolosi, Mustafa Lotya, F. Blighe, Zhenyu Sun, S. De, I. Mcgovern, B. Holland, Michelle T. Byrne, Yurii K. Gun'ko and 9 more. Nature Nanotechnology, 2008

5,806 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fully exploiting the properties of graphene will require a method for the mass production of this remarkable material. Two main routes are possible: large-scale growth or large-scale exfoliation. Here, we demonstrate graphene dispersions with concentrations up to approximately 0.01 mg ml(-1), produced by dispersion and exfoliation of graphite in organic solvents such as N-methyl-pyrrolidone. This is possible because the energy required to exfoliate graphene is balanced by the solvent-graphene interaction for solvents whose surface energies match that of graphene. We confirm the presence of individual graphene sheets by Raman spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy and electron diffraction. Our method results in a monolayer yield of approximately 1 wt%, which could potentially be improved to 7-12 wt% with further processing. The absence of defects or oxides is confirmed by X-ray photoelectron, infrared and Raman spectroscopies. We are able to produce semi-transparent conducting films and conducting composites. Solution processing of graphene opens up a range of potential large-area applications, from device and sensor fabrication to liquid-phase chemistry.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8e208c67545cb9f66185ecfbbbe484721e58a04

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Topological-Insulator Passively Q-Switched Double-Clad Fiber Laser at 2 $\mu$m Wavelength (2014, methodology): “The few-layer TI:Bi2Se3 used in our experiment was prepared by the liquid-phase exfoliation method [54] as follows.”
Covalent bulk functionalization of graphene. (2011, background): “, as well as by solvent-based exfoliation of graphit”
Graphene mode-locked ultrafast laser. (2009, methodology): “This retains the electronic structure of pristine graphene in the exfoliated SLG and FLG flakes.(17,18) We employ bile salts in order to obtain a stable, higher concentration of SLG and FLG than in previous nonaqueous dispersions.”
A simple method for graphene production based on exfoliation of graphite in water using 1-pyrenesulfonic acid sodium salt (2013, background): “[10] Hernandez Y, Nicolosi V, Lotya M, Blighe FM, Sun Z, De S, et al.”
Sensitive electromechanical sensors using viscoelastic graphene-polymer nanocomposites (2016, methodology): “1 (2 ) N B m d d − = + − (6) supporting the validity of this analysis.”